While it is no magic bullet, GTD certainly has helped me take control over my life’s organisation. It has helped make me feel more relaxed at ignoring things that I shouldn’t be doing and clear my mind of the things that I should be doing, because I have it all tracked somewhere.

Before, I used to use a simple text file with headers for TODAY, TOMORROW, THIS WEEK, THIS MONTH, SOON, and some other stuff. I went around in it with vi yanking and pasting day after day.

Contrary to other GTD’ers who use 2.0 technology, I have gone decidedly oldskool. After trying out various things I’m using a text client called yagtd

My reasons are simple. First of all, it’s fast. I want to make sure I can always add a task easily no matter what I’m doing. I have one terminal which is on every workspace, and the first tab is my GTD window. I just switch to it and add tasks. The second reason is that the data file is a simple text file, with one line per task. This I commit to my Subversion tree, and the first thing I do when I log in to any of my machines (my laptop, my home desktop, or my work desktop) is update that checkout, and possibly merge conflicts.

I’ve been making some simple patches against yagtd and the author has been incredibly quick at integrating them, quelling all my aspirations of committing the number one hacker’s GTD sin: writing your own GTD manager.

Though I wouldn’t mind writing a quick GUI to make it easy to re-importantize or re-urgentize tasks :)